RBI wants your data to be secure!

Better Markets Digest #5. In this edition, we look at:

- New rules by RBI for Payment Aggregators(PAs)

- Paytm users get a new UPI ID

- Health insurance policy got an upgrade

Hot off the NSE’s grill: a new F&O contract. Meet the NIFTY NEXT 50.

New Rules ft. RBI

How do you pay when you buy groceries at the supermarket? Or when you’re shopping online? UPI? Credit Card? Debit Card? E- wallet?

All of these payments are made possible via Payment Aggregators (PAs). PAs let businesses receive payment through a variety of methods.

Until now, these PAs could store your data and use it as they wished. The RBI doesn’t like this. Considering how the number of digital transactions in India have been increasing, RBI wants stricter rules in place. And so, it has proposed new guidelines for what PAs can do.

The draft guidelines only allow the card issuer (typically banks) and card networks (VISA, etc) to store transaction data, not the payment aggregator.

The rules are stricter if the payment aggregator is not a bank. They need to register with Financial Intelligence Unit-India (FIU-IND) and monitor if a merchant is misusing the platform. If they’re providing businesses point-of-sales services, they’ll also need to have a minimum net worth of Rs. 15 Crore, and will require authorisation from the RBI. This will make it more expensive to do business as a PA.?

From @paytm to @pt(bank)

Last couple of months have been tough for Paytm:

• RBI saw compliance issues with KYC at Paytm Payments Bank Ltd (PPBL)

• It forced PPBL to stop onboarding new customers, or taking new deposits from its existing customers.
• Paytm parted ways with PPBL. Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma had to resign from PPBL’s board. And more recently, the CEO and MD of PPBL also quit.

We wrote about this a few days back

Since Paytm’s users could no longer use PPBL’s services, the company had to look for other banking partners. And, it did. If you are a Paytm user, you may soon be nudged to use Paytm with a new UPI ID.

Paytm has been losing its market share in the UPI space for a few years. Maybe this finally changes things??

Healthier insurance??

Making an insurance claim is quite frustrating. The insurance industry is opaque and can reject your claims for literally any reason. And you won’t be able to do anything about it. We wrote about this bit here.

The only thing in your control is to disclose everything while getting insurance - whether it's a pre-existing disease or if you are a smoker.??

The IRDAI (the regulatory body for insurance) has now come up with new rules for health insurance.

For one, the IRDA has reduced the moratorium period significantly from 8 years to 5 years. Consider this: you buy a health insurance policy but forget to share a pre existing condition. If you made a claim within 8 years of buying the policy, the insurance provider could reject it. Now, this period has been brought down to 5 years.

What if you did tell your insurance provider about your pre-existing condition? Then, there would be a waiting period, during which you would not be permitted to make claims related to that condition. The longest that period could be, under IRDAI’s rules, used to be 4 years. Now, that has come down to 3 years.?